


Kraken

by Nightdog_Barks



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, Illnesses, Religious Themes & References, Siblings, Subtext, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-21
Updated: 2010-03-21
Packaged: 2017-10-18 07:45:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightdog_Barks/pseuds/Nightdog_Barks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's <i>really</i> wrong with Wilson's brother?  2,434 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kraken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bironic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bironic/gifts).



**Title:** Kraken  
 **Author:** [](http://nightdog-barks.livejournal.com/profile)[**nightdog_barks**](http://nightdog-barks.livejournal.com/) ; significant contributions by [](http://blackmare-9.livejournal.com/profile)[**blackmare_9**](http://blackmare-9.livejournal.com/)  
 **Characters:** House, Wilson, Danny Wilson.  
 **Rating:** R for language  
 **Warnings:** Yes. Please note the fic-fest this was written for. *g*  
 **Spoilers:** Yes, for episode 5.17, "The Social Contract."  
 **Summary:** What's _really_ wrong with Wilson's brother? 2,434 words.  
 **Disclaimer:** Don't own 'em. Never will.  
 **Author Notes:** For [](http://bironic.livejournal.com/profile)[**bironic**](http://bironic.livejournal.com/) ; written for [](http://tentacle-fest.livejournal.com/profile)[**tentacle_fest**](http://tentacle-fest.livejournal.com/). LJ-cut text is from the Cole Porter song of the same name.  
 **Beta:** My intrepid First Readers, with especial thanks to [](http://perspi.livejournal.com/profile)[**perspi**](http://perspi.livejournal.com/).

  
 **  
_Kraken_   
**

  
House's hands are cold and he doesn't know why. It's not cold here in the hallways of Mercy General; still, he finds himself tucking his left hand in his jacket pocket as Javier Gonzalez leads him deeper into the locked wards. When they stop at a doorway to allow a bored guard to check i.d., he takes the opportunity to warm his other hand for a moment.

 _"Está bien,"_ Gonzalez mumbles as the uniformed security drone swipes House's visitor's badge through a reader. _"Él está de aquí ver el calamar."_

The security guy glances up; the expression he doesn't try to hide shows clearly what he thinks of House's visit.

 _"Ese monstruo,"_ he says flatly, and hands the badge back with just the tips of his thick, blunt fingers. Gonzalez looks vaguely embarrassed.

House doesn't say anything.

* * *

The guy in the room doesn't look anything like a cephalopod. He's wrapped up in a blanket, curled up on the industrial-issue cot, and he doesn't raise his head when House steps inside.

"Hey," House says, but the guy still doesn't look up. The only indicator that he's not really asleep is the twitchy movement under the blanket, down where his coccyx should be.

"Hey," House says again, louder. "Squid boy!" and now the guy _does_ look up, anger clear in those dark eyes, those heavy brows furrowing together, and if House didn't know that Wilson was still at the hospital, pursuing that wild goose House had sent him after at the last minute ...

"Hi," House says to the man on the cot. "I'm Greg House. You must be Danny Wilson."

* * *

The minutes pass. House's introduction, his attempts at that detested style of conversation known as _small talk_ , his pointed observations, all have dwindled into silence. He's getting tired of leaning on his cane. Wilson's brother has sat up, but he's not giving anything away; his legs and the blanket are pulled equally high, all the way up to his chin.

House is ready to concede the visit's a bust, but something makes him take two steps forward instead.

Danny's hair is longer than Wilson's and more shaggy, and even though he's the younger brother, he's already showing some broad streaks of grey at the temples. House wonders for a moment if thyroid problems are a complication of the disease -- as if the sufferers needed any more complications. It could be pernicious anemia ... he forces himself to concentrate. He's not here to diagnose; Danny Wilson already knows what's wrong with him.

"What do you want?" Danny says. His voice is harsh and a little rusty, as if he hasn't used it in a while.

"Came to see the monster," House says. His leg's starting to hurt, so he takes a seat on the cot, rests his hands on his cane. "Know where I can find one?"

Danny stares at him; his eyes are actually hazel, House notices, almost jasper -- a mix of almost-green and almost-brown without really being either one.

"Think you're funny?" Danny says finally. Something moves under the blanket -- fingers spreading, fanning out, but both of Danny's hands are clearly visible, clutching the wool bedcover under his chin.

"As a matter of fact, yes. Would you believe there are some people who don't think so?"

Instead of answering, Danny looks away. "I'm not crazy," he says.

"I know," House says. "But you _are_ dying, and your brother wants to talk to you without you running away again." He pauses, glances around at the bare white walls of the small room. "It's just a seventy-two hour hold."

Danny laughs. It's a short, sharp sound.

"So what do you want?" he says again. "Why are you here?"

House bounces his cane on the floor.

"Because I want to know," he says, "how it _feels_."

Danny stares at him. "How it feels?" he says. He lets the edges of the blanket fall open. He's not wearing a t-shirt, and a half-dozen tentacles, slender appendages the approximate length and breadth of young garter snakes, tickle the air with blind, inquisitive tips. "How it _feels?_ " The appendages retreat, curling back on themselves like tightly-wound snails' shells. "Why don't you ask my brother how it feels?"

"That's not -- " House begins, and has to stop and swallow. "That's not what I meant."

"You think I don't fucking _know that?_ " Danny draws the blanket closer around himself, concealing the shy snakes. "Jimmy doesn't know how it _feels_. Only I know how it feels. Jimmy just knows what it's like to _hide_."

House bites off his usual urge to question, to probe, to dissect, and stays silent. Danny makes a strange, half-sobbing sound; an iridescent blue tentacle, longer than the others and shiny as the beaten-metal gloss of a fly's back, reaches out. House wills himself to sit still as the tentacle's tip wavers uncertainly, and after a long moment it touches the arch of his left cheekbone.

He closes his eyes; the touch is delicate, the stroke of a feather, and dry, the flick of a desert lizard's tongue. He wonders if this is how it feels to Wilson. He wonders how he would feel if it were Wilson touching him like this.

"Why aren't you afraid?" Danny's voice seems to come from an indescribably long way away. "Why aren't you afraid of me?"

* * *

"You saw my brother," Wilson says, and he doesn't sound happy.

"I thought you wanted me to see him," House says.

"Not like that," Wilson growls. He puts his hands over his eyes and whispers something to himself, then takes his hands away. "What do you think you're doing?" he says.

House looks at him, tries to imagine Wilson with a cobalt-blue appendage sprouting from his chest. He doesn't answer Wilson's question.

"When did you find out?" he says instead. "Was it a late presentation? When did your parents decide to -- "

"House," Wilson says. "Shut up." He looks away. "It was early."

* * *

Avram Greenberg smiles. It's a broad smile, one of pleasure and pride, one that he's perfected over hundreds of drooling babies at hundreds of _bris_ es. It's actually pretty easy when the _bris_ es are all the same -- the beaming parents, the family gathered round, the invited guests. The guest of honor himself, invariably a chubby, grasping eight-day-old bundle of squirming joy. Who won't be joyful for long, not after Avram does his job.

He smiles again, this time at the happy parents. This time it's Leo and Bette Wilson -- they've been blessed with two sons already, James and Jonathan, and the boys watch, wide-eyed, as Avram slips on his latex gloves. He wonders fleetingly if the children remember their own _bris_ , also at Avram's hands, then dismisses the thought, preferring instead to look forward to his rendezvous with Ilona this afternoon. Avram indulges himself for just a moment, half-dreaming of Ilona Wexler's husky voice, deepened by too many cigarettes and too much whiskey, her long legs, her very willing body ...

It's in this happy state of mind that Avram chants the ancient prayer, gently opens the infant's blanket, and sees that the baby has two penises.

One of which is waving at him.

Much later, after the uproar has died down and Bette Wilson has been sent to her room with a generous dose of Valium, a shaken Avram sits at the kitchen table with a father in mourning.

"It wasn't there before," Leo keeps repeating. He lifts his eyes from the cup of coffee he hasn't touched. "It wasn't there. Bette would have ... " He focuses on Avram. "What are we going to do? My son ... he's a ... " His voice trails away. "Oh my God," he mumbles. "Oh my God."

Avram reaches across the table and clasps Leo's shoulder. "Leo," he says, "you have to be strong. For your wife. For your family." He squeezes Leo's shoulder and gives it a little shake. "They're making advances in medicine every day -- things will work out!"

He hates to lie, but really, what else is he supposed to say? The truth, when Leo can't even call it by the name the old _landsmen_ at the temple use? With their trembling hands and wisps of white hair, who once they've had enough slivovitz, will tell endless stories about monsters of the deep, washed up on cold Baltic shores.

Your son's appendages can be removed, but they'll just come back, within months, if not days. Eventually there will be too much scar tissue and you'll just have to let them grow, until there's too many to keep hidden. Daniel Wilson will be a demon his whole short, miserable life, a thing in the attic that no one wants to look at.

Congratulations, your son's a _kraken_.

* * *

"That can't have been the only time," House says.

Wilson puts down his highball glass and glances at the whiskey bottle, but he doesn't pour himself another. Instead he gives the melting ice a contemplative swirl.

"It was just the beginning," he says. "Until he got older, learned he wasn't supposed to talk about it, show anything, we had to keep an eye on him every minute." Wilson leans back in his chair. "Good thing it doesn't manifest on the extremities or the head, otherwise Danny could never have gone outside." He laughs; it sounds eerily like his brother's. "We told people he was allergic to sunlight."

"Icarus Disorder," House murmurs. "Good one."

"To keep up the cover story, we had to keep buying SPF5000 and smearing him with zinc oxide. Which was also good because it meant nobody wanted to look at him."

House tries to imagine a suntanned Wilson, his nose daubed with a streak of white goo, looking out for his brother as a Danny-tentacle curls lovingly around his waist.

"Vitamin A helped for a while," Wilson continues. "Hydrotherapy. He got into a drug trial when he was a teenager, but the side effects were too severe. You know as well as I do there's only a handful of doctors in the U.S. who'll even look at a Bem Syndrome patient -- Mom and Dad were going to take Danny to Houston, see if that specialist could help, Danny didn't want to go so he ran away."

"Where were you?"

"Med school."

"And that was it?"

Wilson shrugs in seeming resignation. "I saw him here, in Princeton. On a street corner. Went after him but he was gone by the time I got there. That was the last time."

"Until now."

"Yeah. Until now."

They're both silent for a long moment, and House takes the opportunity to refill his own glass. "So what are you going to do?" he says.

Wilson lays his hands flat on the table and stares at them as if he's never seen them before.

"Our parents are coming down," he says. "To take him home."

House thinks many things but doesn't say any of them.

By the evening of the next day, Danny Wilson is gone. Gonzalez confirms it, telling House that the _tentáculo_ -man has been discharged.

* * *

Afterwards he dreams about it. Sometimes. Not every night, but enough. Invariably he's in Wilson's office, by Wilson's desk, and although Wilson's there too, he's not saying anything.

Wilson's tie changes shape, the silk filling out and coming to a point, and the point reaching forward. It brushes past House's ear, warm and light, and makes a gentle curve around the back of his neck. It's already growing longer -- it could throttle him and he'd never escape. He looks into Wilson's eyes, but they're just Wilson-eyes, dark brown like washed river stones. The silken appendage drifts lower, descends the knobbly stepladder of vertebrae, rests for a moment on the swell of his gluteus maximus before tracing a delicate line to the top of his intergluteal cleft, where it stops as if waiting for something.

 _I should run_ , House thinks, but instead he steps closer. It's not that he isn't afraid. He is. It's something else, something he wants to find out.

Before he can learn it, whatever it is, he awakes.

* * *

House is no Freudian, but it means something, all this dreaming, and at first he's worried it means he's subconsciously diagnosed Wilson with something that could kill him. He'd gotten Wilson falling-down drunk one night, waited until the inevitable passing out, and done a very thorough exam that Wilson only remembered the next morning as "Thanks for getting me to bed."

There'd been nothing wrong.

There's still nothing wrong this morning, unless you count whatever is wrong with House, who keeps staring at Wilson's Tie of the Day -- a blue-striped affair that's ugly and lifeless and that House finds himself wanting to touch, just to be sure. Instead he stands beside the kitchen table, resting his hand on Wilson's shoulder, pretending interest in the headlines Wilson's reading. Other people's disasters, as always.

Wilson doesn't flinch but does glance up at him, blinking.

"Cane's in the other room," House says, and nods at the news of the latest Third World tragedy. "How much of your paycheck does the Red Cross get this time?"

"Enough to annoy you," Wilson replies. "Are you okay?" He's leaning half an inch sideways, letting House's hand move with him because it's purely a matter of visual focus. If Wilson wanted to escape, he'd already have done it.

The real question is ... he doesn't know what the question is. Wilson's shoulder is warm and solid. There are no goddamn tentacles under his palm, nothing uncurling, moving like kelp in a slow tide --

He lets go, limps on into the kitchen to raid the coffee pot. No time for his own stupidity when there's caffeine waiting here and stupid sick people waiting at work.

* * *

 _I keep dreaming you have your brother's disease_ is not something House will ever say, and anyway, it isn't strictly true. In the dreams, Wilson has the tentacles but not the failing lungs, the waiting oxygen tank, the death sentence.

"You hungry?" House says instead, already knowing the answer. Wilson's never this pale and scowly at 2 p.m. unless he hasn't eaten lunch.

"I've got to finish ... " Wilson's left hand forms a fist on his desk, flattens an innocent stack of papers resting there. "Starving." He leaves whatever it is and gets up, his shoulders drooping. House's mind provides the image of limp blue appendages dangling, a creature too long out of water.

"Come on," House says, and guides Wilson toward the door with a firm hand on his back. "I feel like sushi -- how about you?"

~ fin


End file.
